By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Evgeni Malkin and Alexander Ovechkin on Draft Day 2004.
For Pittsburgh's hockey sanity, the return of Sidney Crosby couldn't have materialized too early, even if Sid's somewhat sudden reappearance this week smudged the most lustrous angle of today's nationally televised drama in the nation's capital.
As nimble in the conference room as Crosby is on the ice, the NHL and NBC had, by Friday, recast this episode as another Crosby vs. Ovechkin showdown for their urgent promotional purposes, and that may be as you like it, but today's 12:38 faceoff between the Penguins and the desperate Capitals clearly has a superior subplot.
The league's top two scorers are the brilliant Washington sniper Alexander Ovechkin and the Penguins' often equally breathtaking Evgeni Malkin, two Russian superstars skating against each other within weeks of erecting an unprecedented block of NHL history. No Russian player has ever won the Art Ross Trophy, awarded since 1948 to the league's top scorer.
"Ovechkin is not a motivation for me," Malkin said in a translated national conference call this week. "I just try to improve my game, try to be better than I was last year. I'm just trying to make sure our team makes the playoffs. We had a great game against Washington in Pittsburgh, and I'm sure it's going to be another good one."
Malkin led the league in scoring until Ovechkin awoke from an odd seven-game goal-less snooze to put together one of the most spectacular weeks of his career. He had a hat trick before the first period ended Monday night against Boston, scored twice Wednesday night in Buffalo and, after an assist in a 2-1 loss at Boston yesterday, he has six goals and five assists in his past five games.
Ovechkin's 93 points led Malkin by four, and you can't help but wonder what this kind of conspicuous success might be having on the politics of talent procurement in the former Soviet Union. We're still less than two years removed from Malkin's daring detachment from his Russian team at the Helsinki airport and the resultant globe-trotting intrigue that seemed to involve everyone but Boris Badenov before it ended favorably for the Penguins in U.S. District Court.
"Coming out of the [2005] lockout, the Russian federation declined to be part of the player transfer agreement that had been negotiated with the International Ice Hockey Federation, which sets the terms of players transferring between North American and European leagues, and as a result, we're seeing less transfers of Russian players to the NHL," deputy commissioner Bill Daly said Friday on the phone from New York. "Having said that, the best Russian players seem to want to continue to play in the NHL and continue to view it as the premier league in the world, which it is. Those players are still coming. What we're missing is the kind of more marginal players, who are opting to say in the Russian leagues.
"The bottom line is that it hasn't impacted the quality of the product in the NHL, which is still getting the best players in the world, as evidenced by Mr. Malkin in Pittsburgh and Mr. Ovechkin in Washington."
The question is whether the lingering sting of the Malkin episode eventually will have a detrimental impact, or might the transfer agreement ever again be all inclusive.
"We're in discussions about a new agreement and [the Russians] did participate in those discussions on Jan. 16," Daly said. "We certainly want to maintain a dialogue. We've had a very professional, cordial relationship with them."
The president of Malkin's Russian team, Gennady Velichkin of Metallurg Magnitogorsk, called Malkin "a national treasure," and generally sovereign states dislike losing national treasures in foreign court rulings thousands of miles away. It would be a shame if any of the NHL's international agreements were damaged in ways that cramped the kind of talent traffic that's seen the game's level of excellence rise with its global diversity.
"The league absolutely sees the value in diversity," Daly said. "Both from the perspective of widening everyone's horizons and purely from the basic business perspective. Thirty percent of NHL players are born outside North America, which presents an opportunity for connectivity to European hockey and European hockey fans, and that's something we didn't have in the years leading up to the lockout. In the third year post-lockout, a ranking priority will be to grow our brand recognition throughout the world."
Whether the league can ever grow something like a Malkin-Ovechkin duel into a decent television rating for NBC on a Sunday afternoon may or may not be unrelated to this global posture. While no one has to be reminded that there's no shortage of people who just don't like hockey, you can't help but be reminded from time to time in this noisy culture that there's another significant segment of people who just doesn't like foreigners.
On both counts, it's their loss, and that will be obvious for what figure to be three memorable hours this afternoon.
Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283.
First published on March 9, 2008 at 12:00 am
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